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IonQ, Inc. IONQ

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The bet you're really making is that quantum computers stop being lab experiments and start doing paid work, and that IonQ's trapped-ion machines, the kind Amazon and Nvidia already plug into, are the ones customers keep buying. You're betting the $485 million of orders already on the books turns into cash before IonQ runs low, because it spends far more than it earns and fills the gap by printing new stock. Right now sales are exploding, $80 million last quarter, nearly four times a year earlier, yet the company lost money running the business every single quarter and those losses keep growing. You pay about 60 times sales, because there are no profits to price, and even on the revenue Wall Street sees three years out, still 23 times.

Key data

Price$39.52
52-week range$25.89 – $84.64
Price / sales, TTM / FY28E60x / 23x
Price / book4.4x

IONQ · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$1$21$40$59$79 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

IonQ builds quantum computers by trapping individual charged atoms and manipulating them with lasers, an approach that gives it the field's cleanest error rate: it hit 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity in 2025, a world record. It sells two ways: cloud access to its machines through Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and full systems like the new Tempo. Partners named in its own release include AWS, AstraZeneca and Nvidia, working on drug discovery, materials and defense. It has also been buying companies, folding in a SkyWater chip-fabrication business and a market-intelligence unit, so the revenue line now mixes high-concept quantum access with an ordinary foundry whose orders are cancellable until production and which carries little backlog. The moat is a genuine hardware lead in fidelity plus a patent thicket. The hole in it is that quantum computing still has no proven killer application anyone pays real money to run.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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